Canon Photo Fiesta’18 @ Batam : The Highlights

April 8, 2018

Before this trip, I’ve been contemplating if I should go for this short photography trip to Batam. It turns out to be one fruitful trip where I get to put my photography skills into practice and learn from the experts through Canon Photo Fiesta. We stayed one night at Batam View Beach Resort and visited a local kampong to shoot. Here are some of the programme highlights of this trip!

1. Photo Competition

During this trip, we were taken to a mystery location to shoot. Our photo theme was ‘creative’, and we were given about two hours to shoot in this local kampong village called Kampong Terih. This kampong is becoming more of a cultural village for tourists to check out. You can view some of my shots here. It was challenging and tiring shooting under the heat. Look! Even my messy hair started to stand!

2. Travel Photography Workshop

Walking around with a heavy camera under the sweltering heat is no joke. I was so thankful for the invention of air-conditioning. After heading back to the hotel, we went for the various photography workshops conducted by Julian W., Hilarion Goh and Lance Leong. Since three workshops were happening at the same time, I could only choose one photography workshop to attend. Otherwise, I would have attended all three. I attended the travel photography workshop where Julian shared with us some useful travel photography tips.

3. BBQ Dinner

I was looking forward to this BBQ dinner because they would be offering some local delights like satay, ice kacang and kuehs! Our shirts smelt of burning charcoal after the BBQ but it is all worth it.

4. Photo Competition – Gallery Walk

After dinner, we headed up to the meeting room to view all of our photos. Some of the shots were creative! It looks like I had got a lot to learn from these hobbyist photographers too.

It was undoubtedly a tough decision to be made as all the photography masters.

5. Fireworks Photography

In the late evening, we had a chance to shoot fireworks at night. The fireworks shot up three times for us to shoot. It was quite spectacular! I only managed to get a clearer shot of the fireworks on my third try after working out the correct shutter speed and aperture.

6. Astrophotography Workshop

Since it was still cloudy by 11 pm, we were told that the astrophotography session is cancelled. Instead, we get to attend a workshop by Milkyway Astrophotography by Peng Siong. This genre of photography is new to me, and I never heard of it before. I never knew that you could capture the milky way with a DSLR.

7. Model Photoshoot

The next morning we had a model photo shoot after our hearty breakfast at the hotel. While waiting for the Indonesian models to get ready, we decided to shoot one of their hotel staff first. When the Indonesian models came, we started clicking our shutter buttons away.